


in favor of stars

by traynors



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 00:19:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6681907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traynors/pseuds/traynors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sam traynor goes to the stars and comes back</p>
            </blockquote>





	in favor of stars

Sam had not prayed in a long time. The cold hull of a ship made for a poor house of holy words. She could not carve out a space in the bunkers at night to find them again, that space filled with comms and transmissions and the never ending buzz of people. People that needed her. So she gave up on words of faith.

 

Horizon, for its idealistic colony life, could not hold her. Her face dotted with acne and her head full of expectations, she turned from her childhood home in favor of stars. She said a few words before she left but like a comets trail, they fell from her and dissolved into the atmosphere. So she would rise, dazzling, shaking off her notions of faith and the world like dust. The rain and pollution of London collected in her lungs. Some nights, when she put away her lessons and studies, she traded a couple extra minutes of sleep to sit outside. Her balcony was tiny but it was enough to have a plastic lawn chair which she sat in. For a long time she did not move, immobilized by tiredness and lulled by the passing of skycars. The blanket of smog the only constant. Everything bled out, the lights, the skycars, the people. It all bled out into a vague cloud out there, meshed together until she could not recognize one thing from the other. Her parents told her it hadn't always been like this, but it she had to consider why they left in the first place. She turned her chin upward, looking into the sky overhead. Void, nothingness. Patches of thin cloud hinted at the rotation of stars but they condensed and disappeared and she could not find them ever again. Her eyes avoided the city when she shrugged off the night air and turned back inside.

Silence constructed fear and assurance so she lived in both, huddling in the basement. Her mother's wrinkled hand in her own. Her father kept a gun in the safe and he held it downwards, but there were only nine bullets and they knew nine bullets wouldn't kill enough Collectors. In the hours that passed Sam listened for anything to listen to and waited. She took the gun from her father's trembling hands and put in beside her, just close enough for her to grab. Once it was gone he collapsed and held his head and her mother went to him and tried to hide him but Samantha was an adult and knew despair when she saw it. Through the concrete walls she could hear several consecutive explosions and then the lights died.  
Sam doesn't see her at first. She doesn't see a woman but rather a silhouette, shrouded by misconceptions and misunderstanding. Thinking of everything she knew about her. Earth, Alliance, Torfan, the Citadel, Cerberus. Horizon. She catches her in the observation deck, her form standing against the stars, motionless as a photograph. They talk about trivial things that are brushed aside with sighs and affirmations. Shepard's voice sounds like it was strained through cloth until all that was left is something raw, laid bare to her. Notions of politeness and pleasantries lost in the stitches. Shepard tries to hide it, her heavy brow creasing when she hears her own words crack. Sam smiles it away. Shepard doesn't say much but her eyes are kind when she looks at her and when she leaves maybe her hand lingers a little too long on her shoulder. Sam faced the window and looked out onto the plain of stars, unpolluted in the starkness of space. Looking back at her like two kind black eyes. She turns away.

She thinks she knows where her hands should go but they don't and it's more than okay because they laugh more than they have in years. The covers all pushed back. Their dark hair spilling like ink over the pillows. Afforded this time to themselves. As the room darkens she watches Shepard fall asleep, half moon eyelashes hanging over dark circles. Her brow never as relaxed as Sam would have liked. This must be it, Sam wonders. This must be it when I must accept truth in its bleak fashion and let go all I have loved.  
There was a belief held before that she would set aside faith. It wasn't so, in the nature of believers and human tendency. Yes, she found the words again. Watching the woman she loved take baby steps across a hospital floor, a thank you God, thank you God.

Finding a car with wheels was harder than they expected but they ended up with a tiny sea colored car-truck thing that rumbled along just perfectly, thank you very much. It was theirs and that's what mattered, Sam said. The long curving dirt road ahead of them disappeared past Sam's eyes as she watched from the passenger window. Shepard turned the radio up a bit and when Sam glanced over at her she was mouthing the words to a pop song. Her fingers tapped on the wheel. No cold hull of a ship surrounding them and nothing to hold her back. She would carve out those spaces and fill them with words. When Sam looked back onto the countryside, the sun was sinking towards the horizon and its gold spun light weaved throughout the breeze and Sam felt that all was right again. That this was the truth that she would accept, nothing less, nothing more.


End file.
